


The Undiscovered Country

by montparnasse



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Breathplay, F/F, Getting Back Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-24 01:59:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8351878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: Isabela on fatalism, living ghosts, Hawke, and coming home again. But not necessarily in that order.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quintic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quintic/gifts).



> Happy femslashex, quintic! I hope this suits you.

She came to Kirkwall after a few months of slumming unhappily at an inn in Markham, looking out across the unforgiving teeth of the Vimmarks from her window when she dragged herself out of bed at noon every day and feeling some centrifugal tug stretched ineffably across the two hundred miles or so to the west, like she’d left something there and she couldn’t go anywhere without a constant pang in her gut like hunger unsated and gnawing to remind of her of what she’d not so much _lost_ as knowingly and willingly burnt down into the bowels of the red earth. So she got up early, just when the first of the leaves had begun to show their autumn blood, and packed up her summertime clothes and her invincible winter longing and took the first carriage to Ostwick, and then the first ship she could get to Kirkwall a week later, where the Gallows greeted her as ever; the whole thing seemed disappointingly portentous. The irony of it didn’t escape her: you the world’s greatest cheat, destroyer of your own fate, breaker of your own chains, lifting your neck obligingly for the hangman to slip his noose over your head. If there was anyone around to talk to she probably could’ve made it sound funny in a half-assed sort of way.

For a week she slept at The Hanged Man, getting shitfaced drunk late at night and once or twice picking fights with sailors who stared at her tits until Aveline found her and dragged her upstairs to her room, where Isabela figured she’d get a Serious Talking To about responsibility and actions having consequences and how could you and look what you’ve done et cetera unto threat of death and/or exile from the dearest dregs of her city; she tried to forestall the coming volcanic eruption for the sake of her mounting headache by way of a few well-placed comments about seeing Aveline’s admittedly shapely ass out of her guardsman’s clothes, and when that didn’t work she ground her teeth together and told her to fuck off out of her room, and anyway if Aveline didn’t have her head stuffed so far up Donnic Brennan’s ass maybe this city wouldn’t be the hellhole it is and maybe she’d be strung up on a wall somewhere like she ought to be. But Aveline just stared at her with those big spring-green eyes until Isabela reached for her from the end of her bed like a child and Aveline—unhaltingly, miraculously—went to her and let Isabela press her face into her belly and cry and cry and cry. Afterwards she laid down on her bed that smelled of the sea and the deep wintertime freeze, feeling wrung-out and possessed, watching the shadow-play of the firelight across the floor and wondering if this was what it meant to be in thrall.

With that unsexy thought in mind she woke up in the middle of the night three days later, still drunk and starving for something as she fumbled with her coat buttons and stumbled into the snowy Lowtown night, compelled as if by some spell or possibly drunken impulse through the streets to the empty market, where she began furiously to climb the steps, slipping in the gauzy lamplight where the sandstone steps met the sheer cut-glass granite edges of Hightown. This all seemed enormously, transparently symbolic and also a little hilarious in a very fairytale sort of way, so by the time she’d rounded the corner to Hawke’s house she was laughing insanely under her breath, the maniac threads of it freezing on the air as she pounded on the door with a growing sense of apocalypse, certain that whatever was behind the door would devour her or she would devour it: ravenously, hatefully, infinitely lovingly, and indeed when Hawke opened the door at last Isabela was full for a single glass-shard moment with a love so unambiguous, so screamingly raw, that it resembled appetite.

It had been three years; for Hawke, she thought it may well have been some forsaken eternity. Her hair was still coal-stone black and short, and her eyes were a wild thunderous blue out of the dark nothing, but her forehead was creased with some phantom pain and she was holding her nightshirt together at the neck, her hand clammy with nightmare sweat, and Isabela thought in the infrequent lamplight that she looked older than she was. Who were you, she wondered stupidly, her hand still raised, who were you without me. Who were you, whose very soul I knew, who were you that I couldn’t find you across this unspeakable gulf of years. Who was I, that I took everything I had and ran so far away from you.

“What time,” said Hawke when she seemed to ascertain that she wasn’t dreaming, “what time do you think it is.”

“I just woke up. I wouldn’t know.”

Hawke blinked rapidly and then squeezed her eyes shut, like she was trying to blink Isabela out of them. When she opened them again they were narrower, one arm still at the door and the other bent almost defensively, somehow like a cornered animal and a huntress alike; Isabela felt her stomach drop out sickeningly upon realizing she hadn’t accounted for what she’d do if Hawke turned her away, which was a very real possibility given the bullshit trajectory of her entire life. “You just woke up. You just woke up, what, from your three years’ fucking slumber? And this is the part where I let you in and open my arms and make you some soup and bend over? Is that what this is?”

“I think I’d puke if I ate anything right now but I can absolutely bend over if you’d rather.”

“You’re not funny and you’ve never been funny.”

“That’s not what you said last—whenever the last time was,” she said, idiotically. Even drunk she remembered the last time, poured out on Hawke’s sheets with her jewelry still on with the drunks arguing in the street below, the curtains open to let the night winds in, Hawke watching intently at the moonlight getting in the places where their skin touched. Already she had been plotting the quickest route out of the city with Hawke’s palm grinding between her legs. “I just woke up,” she said, again, because it seemed somehow significant in ways that struck some unutterable out-of-tune chord inside her.

“So did I, thanks. You don’t see me pounding on other people’s doors in the middle of the night.”

“Shut up and I’ll tell you something,” she said, coming closer to the warm velvet dark. Hawke didn’t move away and Isabela again had the impression of two animals circling each other before a fight. “I think I’m, it’s like, I think someone’s _enchanted_ me. Like I’m cursed or something.”

“Cursed,” said Hawke. She had that look like she was trying very hard not to smile and at the same time wanted to make it obvious that she was trying very hard not to smile.

And if you ever really loved me you’d release me here and now, relinquish any hold you still have over me, drive your presence from the creases of my very soul where you have accumulated like pocket lint. She’d had a whole fucking speech planned out and woven into an ornate tapestry to unroll at Hawke’s feet but unfortunately she’d completely forgotten it in her general shitfaced drunkenness somewhere around the Chantry courtyard and couldn’t find the thread of it again, except the part where she was going to climb the vines to Hawke’s window for the ridiculous metaphor of it all and offer to flay herself open so Hawke could see the monstrous possessing thing beating its bird-wings inside her, screaming always _you you you you you_ like an opium addict itching behind her teeth for a drop of laudanum. Some days after she left Kirkwall she would have taken anything—any hate, any measure of agony, any bright crack of hope glowing underneath the door—just to have Hawke again. They could have driven each other to madness and been happy that way, although depending on who you asked she supposed they already had.

When she was young she watched her mother perform or pretend to perform exorcisms on several occasions for visiting friends or sick women from Llomerryn, and Isabela would watch them from her bedroom doorway half-jealous of her mother’s attention on them as they twitched and moaned and screamed as if they were dying; it must hurt, she thought, to sever what had become yours. Spiritual vivisection. Bleeding holes eaten in your soul like worms that had to be cauterized. In the cold Hawke opened the door just a fraction of an inch and Isabela felt the honeyed light inside whisper though her coat pockets in a lyrical draught, shaking up her spine like a tremor in the rafters of her body.

“Do you want to hear about how I’m cursed body and mind and soul et cetera or what? Only it’s freezing and I’m,” she said, swallowing hoarfrost, “I am so drunk I don’t want to move honestly, and all I do is miss you, and I’m fucking _cursed_ , Hawke, and I wish you would kiss me almost as much as I wish I would never have to see you again and I can’t feel my fucking legs from the knee down. Is this how it’s going to be.”

The door creaked open all the way. “I guess you’d better come in then,” said Hawke.

They were the first words they had spoken to each other in three years. In the morning Isabela would remember none of them.

—

For the first few nights they slept top to tail in Hawke’s bed, lulled by the faraway hum of the sea as the Kirkwall winter drew in and Isabela began to wake in the middle of the night cradling Hawke’s feet in her arms or with Hawke’s arm around her knees like an infernal tether; they would get up in the morning unslept and unspeaking, and Isabela would go about trying to make an omelet in the big empty kitchen while Hawke sat at the table with tea and a newspaper she obviously wasn’t reading. When she made unfunny jokes Hawke usually ignored them, or else she tried to laugh and sounded like something hollowed-out, like the burnt-out trunk of a dead tree falling. She had never been any more comfortable in her open wound of a house than Isabela had been, and often they left for the entire day to roam the Hightown market or get wasted at The Hanged Man until they had to carry each other home, where they snapped at each other’s heels and argued over nothing early in the morning until one of them got up and started a fire in the hearth (usually puking in the process) and they fell asleep in a tangle wherever they were, Hawke shifting against her with a tectonic yearning the way she used to, as if she’d caught her reflection in Isabela and needed to match herself to it.

On the eighth morning she woke up to Hawke tracing her callused white thumb over the bone-ridge of her callused brown ankle, sweet soothing nonsense murmured runic and familiar into her skin while the first of the winter light lanced through the gap in the curtains. Lying there with her Isabela felt like they were the only two women left alive, just come up to break the surface of the years after missing every shuddering apocalypse-blast at the end of the world; she curled her fingers around Hawke’s knees, face pressed to her shins in perverse consecration, and when they finally got out of bed around eleven neither of them said a single word about it.

If you’re not afraid to do something then don’t fucking be afraid to talk about it, Isabela wanted to scream. Immediately she thought herself a hypocrite and a philanthropist for dispensing such dearly valuable and altogether unheeded advice, first in succession, and then cyclically, ceaselessly.

—

After a while it became a habit the way all habits did for her, which was by way of not questioning what the hell she thought she was doing. Again she began to wonder what it felt like to be possessed: that every night she went to bed missing Hawke, who was lying right beside her, that every morning she woke up feeling somehow bereft although she could feel her breathing body in the bed with her, her heart beating in percussive unknowing with late dreams until she woke with a jolt, like she was surprised to find herself back in this world after all. Sometimes it was the same feeling Isabela got from being shipwrecked, strangled in her own sails and going nowhere; she had never felt so dead or so alive.

Probably she spent too much time deconstructing the whole thing while she was away and that was why she couldn’t shake the feeling of a pause, intermission, like the world was holding its breath. Eventually it all turned into some chicken-or-egg question, i.e. was it all her fault like she knew Hawke had likely entertained it was, why didn’t she rip the first splinters out of herself so very many years ago when she knew they were there like burrs beneath her skin just waiting to get into her blood, was this all actually because no one ever cared about her enough as a child and now she didn’t know what to do with the certainty of knowing that someone loved her. Certainly they had both hated each other with it and maybe still did, but it had become very clear after a while that she would be beholden always to this golden umbilical thread stretched ineffably between them, chasing or running away or coming back, always pulled on marionette strings like a broken time signature, a compass needle yearning for north north north. It was a chain like any other and in nurturing it she had thought she would make it her prison; she had thought, when she was pretending she couldn’t smell Hawke on her clothes in Markham, that she would break it as she had broken all the others.

The nights brought the snow down from the mountains such that they couldn’t leave because it was impossible to see your own hand in front of your face to find the way back home. They sat on the floor in front of the fire where the tile was warm against their legs and Hawke made them hot chocolate with chili while the wind shivered through the walls like needles, rattling the dead bones of the ivy on the side of the house. They had fought the night before, brittly; on the table this morning Isabela had left an amethyst necklace she’d found in Amaranthine set with a fine patina of dust for amends instead of an apology, because they’d never been good those, and because a fortune teller in Antiva had told her once that amethyst was good for healing. She had also told Isabela she would twice lose her love, but only once would she find it again, which she had never put much stock into as the woman had also told her she herself would be dead by now.

“Meredith wants to see me tomorrow,” said Hawke, who had been staring out the window for the last fifteen minutes. “I think she’s going to have to wait.”

“Can’t she, I don’t know, just come by here instead? It’s not like she’s never creeping around Hightown.”

“Please. Like she’d miss a chance to make me walk through the Gallows. At least I can catch up with Margitte, I suppose.” It was the third or fourth time she’d mentioned Margitte since Isabela had been staying with her, and for the third of fourth time she wondered with a feral sort of jealousy at the nature of Hawke’s relationship with Margitte. “You’re welcome to come if you’d like. Maybe she’ll have a job for us up the coast or something—it’d be fun.”

At least it’d be something to do other than sit here and make boring toast-and-tea conversation like Hawke didn’t know what she looked like naked and she’d never made Hawke come in the shadows along the Chantry road and she was not possessed in her rib rungs and her heart-meat by the sentient presence of another like a second heartbeat drumming up against her own. “I’d like that,” she said, and because she was feeling petty and extremely vindictive, “maybe we could take Margitte with us so you two could finish catching up.”

Hawke’s lips pressed together tight and then twisted, iron-shrewd. “She looks absolutely nothing like you and she’s never even been to Ferelden, if you must know. That was why.”

“Zevran Arainai looks nothing like you either but I can go entire _days_ without bringing him up. Amazing, right?”

“Is that where you went? Antiva?”

“For a while,” said Isabela. Inside her something rabid flickered through her chest and thrummed with her pulse in a pang not unlike being pierced with a spear: first the tip, and then the entire weight of it firing across every nerve in the body. “Rivain, too, and Ostwick. For a year I stayed in Markham. My room faced west.”

“What were you doing in Markham?” asked Hawke. She’d started chewing her fingernails.

“Odd jobs. Fucking, sometimes. I hired on as a sailor a few times, picked noblemen’s pockets when I had to, stopped looking in the mirror. What were you doing in Kirkwall?”

“Odd jobs, usually for Meredith or Orsino, fucking sometimes, letting the house go to shit. Last year I shaved my head.” Outside the snow was making a soft kissing sound against the window, and Hawke pulled her knees up to her chest; it made her look very young, and Isabela wondered as she sometimes did what kind of child Hawke had been in Lothering, who she had been before she took her own ship to the Gallows. “You know I never wanted to come here. I especially never wanted to come _here_ ,” said Hawke, gesturing to the vaulted ceiling. “And now I can hardly leave.”

“Neither did I,” said Isabela. When Hawke looked at her she realized she was smiling a feral, nervous thing with too many teeth but she forced herself to hold Hawke’s eyes; don’t fuck this up, she told herself, the unending mantra: don’t fuck this up, don’t you dare fuck this up. “Suppose that’s something we’ve always had in common one way or another.”

“What, being stranded? Or being a couple of miserable fucks and not even like, trying to do anything about it.”

“I’ve been so royally fucked since the day you walked into The Hanged Man,” said Isabela, exhaling it all like smoke on the thread of her breath. It was the most she could remember ever saying about what she felt, like she had been starving herself for years and years and years and still couldn’t bring herself to ask for anything. Both of them were grown women and they still couldn’t talk about their feelings without some kind of spiritual evisceration. “Sometimes I think—when I look back on it I mean, I think that very first day, the moment I saw you. The minute you spoke to me, the very first words out of your mouth, when I met you—it was like somewhere in me I knew that it’d be you. It was only ever going to be you.”

Hawke made a sound that was a sob or laughter or both. “You said something about hoisting the mainsail. You made it sound extremely sexual.”

“That does sound like me. But if I remember it was a beautiful first impression given how you fairly melted out of your boots within ten minutes.”

“I remember everything you’ve ever said to me,” said Hawke, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. Isabela felt it like a blow to the ribs, or a ship dropping out after the crest of a large wave; when she turned to Hawke again she let it show on her face. “Sometimes I feel like all I’ve done is remember, it—it’s this, I don’t know, this compulsion. Maybe it’s the same thing you meant when you came here breaking down my door about feeling cursed. No matter what I do, all I have to do is brush off the dust and you’re there underneath everything. It’s killing me, you know? Everything always runs back to you, every, every single song I hear or stupid poem I read, it’s all you. I can’t decide if it’s from loving you or the general obsessiveness of the whole thing or if I’m really going mad.” As if to make her point she laughed her wild animal laugh, like a raven crying out a bad omen. “And you’re still here.”

Her heart was beating and beating the way it had been when she’d sailed for the first time, right after she’d stolen her husband’s ship crew and all. For a moment she forgot to breathe, and when she did it was a shock through her skin and bones like coming alive again; her heart was in her mouth, and she was holding very still so as not to bite down and do any irreparable damage, and all she was, all she was was yearning and fever, the wires of her own body a straw kite straining for the freeing lilt of the wind.

“Are you going to throw me out on my ass, then?” she asked. She felt wild, voltaic; the fire needed more wood but she stood up in a waking dream and watched Hawke’s eyes flow with her where she still sat on the floor.

“Isabela, all I’ve ever wanted is you,” said Hawke, her brow creased like it hurt to say it after so long. “All I’ve ever wanted is you and I haven’t even had that.”

“If we’re really doing this I need some whiskey.”

“Why’re you still wearing my scarf?”

“When a woman gives me something I wear it,” said Isabela. Her throat was tight and she kept having to catch her breath as if she was coming down with a cough.

“Even if you stole it from around her neck?”

“Do you really not fucking get it,” she asked, curling in on herself because something in her was bleeding and it had been bleeding for near-on a decade, “don’t you fucking get it?”

Hawke watched her, trancelike, unblinking, and then she stood. Between them Isabela felt a pendulum swinging, counting each moment she’d suffered without this, without all the things she’d lost or snuffed out on her own. Then Hawke said, “You told me you wanted to kiss me.”

So Isabela did.

It was like the first time and not: Hawke’s hands went immediately up to Isabela’s shoulders and they breathed together, teeth to teeth as Hawke’s hands slid down her chest to her breasts and squeezed when Isabela kissed her again, a wet slide of lips and tongue made more compelling by the angle they made when she’d shoved Hawke against the wall; by the time Hawke started sucking something hot into her neck Isabela had already gotten a thigh between her legs and began dragging it against her, gasping when Hawke bit down hard on her collarbone. For a moment she thought she could hear her heart beating in the walls but when she pulled away she realized it was the wind throttling the shutters against the bricks.

“I’m not,” Isabela stuttered—Hawke had snuck a cold hand under her shirt and her mouth was sucking something budlike and electric, “I don’t want to fuck against the _wall_ for the first time in three years, Hawke, I want—I want to be on your bed,” she said, “I want you under me.”

They went tripping over themselves to the cold bedroom, where they undressed each other slowly; each new-old inch of skin was a vicious sort of joy Isabela wanted to hoard and fold away somewhere deep in her belly, something she wanted to wear around her neck and her fingers like jewelry. Here was the same mouth Hawke had pressed against her jawline so long ago, here were the same narrow hips, the same china-blue eyes, the same secret inward curl of her spine. Here were her own long fingers, her own dark hair grown past her shoulders now, her own lungs swelling and deflating beneath Hawke’s palms; here were all the miles they had ever put between them, here was every unquiet dream, here was every blessing and every curse, unfurling with the shadow-spaces where their skin touched in holy reclamation.

Isabela drug her mouth everywhere, her hair pulled down loose and falling all over them in a feather-ticklish veil until Hawke was panting against her, clutching the back of her head. She tasted like rain, or sweat, and the sheets still smelled faintly of lavender when Isabela pressed her nose to them and reached down and cupped her palm heavily against the soft jut between Hawke’s thighs, making her hips jump once, then twice when Isabela circled her clit with her middle finger and then parted the wet lips there with her fingers, moving up Hawke’s body to straddle one of her thighs. Hawke bent her knee obligingly and pressed her thigh up between Isabela’s legs where she could feel herself slick against Hawke’s skin, the long molten drag of pleasure pulsing in violin vibrations when she began to ride Hawke’s thigh. With just her fingertips she pressed inside and then traced tiny ribbons up to Hawke’s clit again, rubbing slowly over it in clumsy curlicues and back down again until Hawke gasped and jerked her thigh up in a wave, making something golden dissolve deep inside her. 

“Would you just,” Hawke was saying, her eyes half-open and sepia-cunning, “Isabela, come on, if you’re going to do it—”

She bent down and kissed Hawke, their bodies in a sort of crescendo, tugging her bottom lip sharply between her teeth, feeling some match-flare light up from the inside and spread in a static shiver across her skin. At some point Hawke got a hand between Isabela’s clit and her thigh, stroking maddeningly around but never over it until her movements began to stutter when Isabela pressed two fingers deep inside her to the second knuckle and curled them gently, thrusting deeply, again, again. Against the wetness of her legs Isabela could feel her fingers shake and leaned down to press her ear to Hawke’s chest as if listening for signs within her body; when she came, Isabela pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her breast where her heat was wild wild wild on her tongue like a bird beating against her ribs, the rhythm of it so familiar that for a single brittle moment Isabela thought of all the poetry she’d ever forgotten, all the songs she’d heard without Hawke, all the music she’d ever loved.

Hawke was still panting when Isabela guided her hand between her legs again and was instead pressed up against the headboard, where Hawke shoved her legs apart so that they fell around her in a diamond shape. “You’re so,” said Hawke, looking at her with an unbelieving wonder, her ink-spill hair in her eyes, like Isabela was a vein of gold or like she couldn’t believe her luck. “You were,” said Hawke, rubbing a palm up Isabela’s side to her breast and leaning down, sucking a nipple into her mouth.

“I was what,” she whispered. Already Hawke’s fingers were tracing something runic above her clit and Isabela could do nothing but stare and reach for her with a blunt and ragged starvation, holding Hawke’s head to her neck, their shoulders and breasts brushing electrically. 

“Everything,” Hawke said against her breast, “everything.” Unsaid: we could have been lost to each other forever. We very nearly were.

The percussive heartbeat-pulse of it was like kindling; she could feel every part of herself open and wanting, unstranded and unchained, beholden to nothing but this golden thread they’d made between them or that—at her most morose—she entertained had always been there, waiting to be unwound. Hawke’s fingers at last stroked slowly over her clit and Isabela felt her hips flinch, rolling heavily into Hawke’s hand and biting down at the basin of Hawke’s neck and shoulder until she tasted the iron-burn burst of blood. Reaching down with a sweaty hand she took Hawke’s left wrist, which had been splayed out wildly underneath Isabela’s ass and pulled it upwards, letting Hawke stop to flit her fingers across the landmarks of her body, slideshow-slow, delving into her navel, the ridge of her hips, the slopes of her ribcage, her chest where her laughter unravels in ecstatic rubber-band vibrations until they reached Isabela’s neck, where Isabela tugged once, twice, and then let go. She thought she could feel her own eyes glowing unworldly in the dark, embers or lit fuses hissing away.

“Come on,” she urged without breath, swallowing under Hawke’s palm, “I want it, you know I want it, come _on_. Come on and do it.”

One by one Hawke wrapped her fingers around Isabela’s throat and rubbed her callused palm up and down in a kind of arpeggio, her other hand drawing scorching-slick incantations over Isabela’s clit. Unblinking Isabela watched as Hawke tightened her fingers and squeezed gently so that she could feel her pulse beating around them, red red red, hungry for anything, hungry for so long; the thrill of it struck flint and tinder low in her belly and she gasped, straining, as Hawke crooked a finger deep inside her and tightened her fingers in slow glacial increments like hours passing by, her thumb stroking across a vein-line underneath Isabela’s jaw, her breath coming in shadows, evaporating into the sloe blue dark. A small drop of sweat worked its way down the juncture where her jaw met her neck in a snow-melt and Hawke pressed her thumb to it, smearing it all the way to her clavicle, making her moan tightly.

“You like this,” said Hawke, who was herself breathing heavily, almost reverently. Isabela did like it very much and had told Hawke on several carnal occasions in the past just how much and how dearly she liked it; Hawke stroked two fingers inside her and pulled out just to the tips, fucking her faster, relentless, and she felt herself clench hard around them, hips jerking up into the spooling tidal rush of it. “Isabela—Isabela.”

Her vision began to blur and darken at the very distant edges and bled in spider-webs through her eyes, Hawke’s fingers bearing down in a ruthless vise-grip until the sweet tearing unbecoming of it burnt out everything but the choking ring of Hawke’s knuckles squeezing and loosening like the chamber of an alien heart, the song of her breath constricting in bright staccato shards. All there was was that ancient and immortal longing; all there was was her heart in Hawke’s fist, Hawke’s blood still on her lips, the join of their bodies moving indelibly together with what only they knew caught ineffably in the narrow thread of their shared breath. No ghosts, no could-have-beens, no if-if-if. This was her only, her only—this was her altar and her exorcism, her sacred hymn and her divine compulsion, the thing she would have ridden into battle for or held her throat up for the sacrificial dagger, and at one point indeed she had; this was what she would have worshipped, her only, this thing that wound around them like the warm blanks of the years, the ineluctable eternal—her only, her only.

Hawke’s hand loosened minutely again and she gasped in a lungful of air before the fingers squeezed around the frantic blood-beating in her neck and she began to pant, one-two-three, one-two-three, like a broken clock hand spinning too fast. Somehow her breath matched to Hawke’s every time she closed her fist a fraction more, slow as sundial shadows. “Breathe,” Hawke was saying, thought it was unnecessary: she could do nothing but breathe even as her groan was choked off when Hawke pressed her fingers up underneath her clit, feeling it flare in her lungs, in her belly.

The hummingbird flutter of her heart began altogether too soon to thrum in her ears and she pressed her hand to Hawke’s fingers around her throat, trying to orchestrate the movement of her hips with the infinite tightening of it, Hawke’s fingers fucking her deeper, deeper, the heel of her palm grinding against Isabela’s clit. She felt like a collapsed star hoarding light and time and change, dense and ancient, full of herself, full of Hawke, exultant and wild. When at last Hawke pulled her fingers out and drew them up Isabela’s slit just above her clit again she felt the sharp icepick gasp rip out of her like a tear in the atmosphere before it was cut off entirely by one final last tightening of Hawke’s grip, cutting off her wing-beat breath like candlelight pinched out between two fingers. 

“I can feel you,” said Hawke, all wonder, all awe, almost prayerful. She kissed the curve of Isabela’s shoulder, sulky-sultry, and Isabela had to grab a fistful of the sheets and pull. “I can feel your heart beating.”

As her vision clouded entirely she felt it as something like magnetic north racing in a loud blood-swill inside her, the ecstatic swallowing blackness of it buzzing behind her teeth. At once she felt Hawke lean forward to flick her tongue out across her nipple and drew her fingers in tight corkscrew-circles directly over Isabela’s clit; she tried to gasp and couldn’t, arching as if out of her own body, everything eclipsing but the clasp of Hawke’s hand and their threaded limbs, the slick friction of Hawke’s fingers stroking over her clit unyieldingly, filling up—up—then spilling, spilling, the spreading wildfire rush of it jolting wildly between her legs and melting through her limbs. Hawke released her throat immediately and the first breath that tore into her exhausted lungs was like the edge of knife piercing through a sheet of ice, singed hotly against the thick molten pleasure of it, the miracle of her lungs expanding and contracting, her heartbeat flooding, alive, alive, alive. Outside the snow was driving in the lamplights and everything rushed back into her like stars flying past her eyes: light focusing, darkness bending, world unwinding; she gulped it all down in starved breaths, a fine tremble working up her spine as Hawke’s fingers slowed and Isabela reached for her hand, cradling it against the hollow of her throat like some priceless treasure she’d found in a dockside warehouse, hers and hers alone.

“Alright?” Hawke asked her. She was rubbing her thumbs into the sides of Isabela’s neck where likely there would be bruises in the morning, soft syllabic moth-wings smoothing down her vein-lines. Her mouth was open slightly and she was staring at Isabela as if she’d just looked into the nighttime dark and found something beautiful; by way of answer Isabela leaned forward and kissed her feverishly with her hands tangled in Hawke’s hair, holding her there, heart beating.

“More than,” she said hoarsely, no space between them. They laid down and pulled the quilt up against the winter shiver, Hawke’s hand stroking over her shoulders and her hip and finally coming to rest between her breasts, over her heart. Around her she could feel the shadows and the ghosts and the years diffuse into the heavy blissful warmth in her very bones, breathing very deeply the way she did after a cleansing cry or running a very long way; it felt exactly like being newborn, everything a revelation, as if the bed had become the universe and the universe had become the bed. She wanted to swallow Hawke whole. “You know I definitely didn’t come here intending to seduce you with my mere presence but I suppose if history’s anything to go by, I really should’ve seen it coming. You’re a _beast_ , Hawke.”

“Liar.” They laughed, whisperingly. “Need I remind you who used to climb in through the window and parade around in her knickers and an unbuttoned nightshirt in the summers, looking for—what was it? A cold drink and someone to oil your abdominals after a long sweaty day down at the docks? You’ve never been subtle it in your life.”

“Only because it’d take us twice as long to do anything if I was, and where would you even be without my lack of foresight,” she said, watching Hawke take her middle finger and bite it gently between her front teeth. “Or my brilliant petty theft frankly.”

“Are you sure you want me to answer that? Because there at least two hundred things—”

“You talk too much, sweet thing.”

“Excuse me. You started it and I don’t hear you shutting up either and if I recall correctly—and I _do_ —you’ve waxed poetic on several occasions about liking my mouth open, in fact I think you were begging for it at one point, if you need reminding.”

Isabela laughed, a rough out-of-tune peal against Hawke’s skin. She felt wide open, full up with lightning and honey. “Gets you hot, doesn’t it,” she said, kissing her deeply until their eyes flickered open again, and then, “Hawke.”

“I know,” said Hawke, “Isabela. I know.” 

“Do you really.”

Hawke made a face like she’d just been told a bad joke. “Yes,” she said, “yes, yes. Always. You have no idea—”

“I think I’ve got some.”

“Shut up. I’m trying to be romantic.” She tugged at a lock of Hawke’s hair and breathed and breathed. “Every morning when I wake up you’re the first thing I think of. Sometimes I dream about you, and I can’t speak or sometimes feel you but and I think I’d still bargain my soul away just to keep it if I didn’t damn well know better, but it’s always been—you understand? It’s you. And I’m in this, every fucking, every last bit, down to my last breath or death by hellfire I guess, whatever’s first,” said Hawke, and pulled Isabela’s head down to kiss her, dreamily, the taut coil of their bodies wound around each other like one single two-headed creature, their hands jangling in bright chords down each other’s spines. “Trust me?”

“Never,” said Isabela, and they laughed until she kissed the twist at the corner of Hawke’s mouth, her hand coming up to rest over the slope of her rib-rungs, counting off the years. “On the days when I could’ve happily throttled you for inhabiting my entire bloody brain or just, I don’t know, sailed all the way out of Thedas and into whatever wasteland might be waiting out there just to get away, there was only you, Hawke. I can’t get away because it’s just in me too deep. And even then, I don’t think anyone’s ever going to make me feel how you make me feel. I was sort of resigned to that, you know, ever after the Event,” she said, eyes closed, and then: “I want this. I haven’t had much worth having and I’ve thrown away what I did or else I just let it sit and go to vinegar. But I want this—Hawke. I want this.”

It was as honest as she had been since she was a child, begging her mother to take her home, her dirty wedding dress dragging in the dirt and gold strung up her arms and around her neck and fingers, a piece for every bone in her body, enumerating her worth. Dressed for ceremonial death she had waited around every corner on the way to her husband’s home for her mother to catch up to her and tell her to come home, that they’d take the money and run. She never did.

Hawke’s arms came up around her waist and reeled her in. When she opened her eyes all she could see was Hawke’s hair across her nose, their bodies open and intertwined. “Then have me,” said Hawke.

Later she wouldn’t recall how long they held each other in the dark like driftwood, the shadows on the white walls of the room reflecting the snow outside with a blue like skim milk that lingered when she closed her eyes, the lullaby hush of their breathing rocking her gently in the palm of the night. All the long burning years, all her nothing-nights and she had found herself somehow at the threshold of a dream unearthed from the very wilderness of her soul; with a sudden feeling of joyful freefall-flight washing over her, she closed her eyes and let it in. 

—

By the time the snow melted she was back at The Hanged Man with Hawke’s stockings and nightshirt tangled in the drawer with her own, well-used and always warm it seemed when she wore them to bed herself on the nights when Hawke wasn’t there. Often when she came in from the Lowtown cold she thought that her room held a certain light or a kind of golden gloaming glow, not like home really but like belonging, and it surprised even her to find that it was usually exactly where she wanted to be, there with the drunks and the guitar music and the shitty ale and her landlocked feet underneath her. She figured that if she was going to inhabit a place, then she should inhabit it completely; when she came back every night she could find herself and Hawke scattered like leaves from corner to corner in every cobweb and piece of dirty laundry she couldn’t be bothered to do anything about. 

More and more she’d been spending time at the docks to mine what she could regarding Castillon and Meredith and Orsino too. To her Kirkwall felt increasingly scraped raw, the wise, ancient skin of the city peeled back and crimped around a grenade pin, and lately she’d heard things on jobs or at Hightown parties with Hawke—from mercenaries, from escaped mages, from women in the shadows—that got into her dreams and set down roots like a tumor. Twice a week she helped mages or Lowtown folk stow away on cargo ships and once in the tavern an old woman with teeth like a piranha had gone into something of a trance, her eyes rolled back, her voice infernal fire on brimstone, and made a prophecy about the end of all things; Isabela bought her a drink and pointed her to the first ship out of the city, reckoning that at least she could help reduce the collateral this time around.

Given the general state of the terrible badness and pre-apocalyptic unrest Hawke was often away and often attempting emergency intervention to prevent mass murder or ritual demonic slaughter or similar, and so in the agonizing thick of it Isabela let Hawke come to her as much as she went to Hawke. Usually she’d help herself to the kitchen at Hightown or come back from the coast to find Hawke drinking tea with an extremely significant amount of whiskey and another cup waiting for Isabela on the table, and they’d get shepherd’s pie or potato pasties from downstairs and they wouldn’t leave the room for the rest of the night. She liked waking up to her best: the snick-lock of the door in her heart and the sound of Hawke tugging her boots off in the last dun-colored light of the fire before she brought the chill into bed with Isabela, where they’d talk between dreams about where they’d been and who they’d seen, or Isabela would slip a hand up Hawke’s flank or around the inside of her thigh and they’d have sex in the summoning dark with the gauzy lamplight coming through the curtains, lying in with coffee wearing not much of anything and talking late into the morning.

Between them were so many things: the tavern, Isabela’s Lowtown market quilt, three blank starving years, the mountains and the sea, the fractured landscape of their history, Hawke’s mouth, her hands, their holy yearning. They were trying so very much to keep them all.

“You’ve really got to stop coming in at normal hours,” Isabela told her, stretched out on the bed, watching Hawke set out the two chipped blue teacups that came with the room. Outside it was just starting to be golden midafternoon. “You’re losing your vigor. Where’s the surprise? Where’s the thrill, huh?”

“I’ll give you _thrill_ ,” said Hawke. Without looking Isabela could hear the smile in her voice and folded it away dep in her belly along with the joy of having put it there. “Are you getting _lonely_? Is that what this is about? If you need a good fuck you’ve only to ask, love.”

“First of all, fuck off,” she said, “and second, it’s not my fault we’re both such hot commodities these days. Except I don’t envy you stuck between Meredith and Orsino’s asses, it’s not leaving you enough time for mine.”

“My bloody poetess,” said Hawke, sitting down at the end of the bed and pressing a cup into Isabela’s hands. She was slouching so badly Isabela sat up and rubbed her back for a moment. “I did see Meredith on my way down here. All full of blood magic and justice and I’m just, Isabela, I’m so tired of everything. All I ever wanted was my very own piece of disgusting Lowtown sky.”

“Liar,” said Isabela. She reached over and took Hawke’s hand, pressing her mouth to the fingertips, the blue skip of veins under her wrist. Unsaid: I don’t know how much longer this can last. Unsaid: I will not leave this place without you again.

Of course Hawke already knew; sometimes she wondered if there was some umbilical thread stretched between their brains that could communicate these telepathic impulses in electrical waves, which made the times when they were far from each other even more pronounced. Several times in her post-Event exile she had woken in the night with a knee aching or an old scar throbbing like history and she would know somehow that Hawke was lying awake unsleeping two hundred miles cross-country. They sat up and Hawke leaned into her, her head dropping sweetly onto Isabela’s shoulder. Unsaid: I know.

“Maybe,” said Hawke. “But it’s like, how is it even for these people to decide any more than it is for us. Half the time all I’m doing is like, keeping anyone’s head from getting unceremoniously chopped off. Or just ”

“Brave woman,” she laughed. “The face of the resistance. At least I’ve taught you something.”

“More than,” said Hawke.

Justice was a concept that had never made much sense, and really she couldn’t even define it if pressed; it was perhaps her dagger in her husband’s head, or the crows feasting on Castillon’s eyes. Still it could not give her back the long wasting years and the view of the bay from her mother’s wilted front yard. Where did it begin and where did it end. “All we ever do is react, Hawke,” she said, feeling Hawke take her hand and trace a bitten-bloody thumbnail into her life line. “I’m not entirely sure it ever stops. You just find something to grab onto and take your giggles where you can.”

“What would I do without you to put things into perspective for me.”

“Certainly you’re not going to find better prospects in Hightown,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

“No,” Hawke said brightly.

“D’you ever feel like, I don’t know, even if it all goes to shit, which it’s almost statistically guaranteed to do, and we end up right at the middle of it, us being us—you’d still be alright with that?”

“And us being us, we’ll probably cheat it and wind up somewhere in the Anderfels as fisherwomen using illicit magic to frighten travelers away from our two-woman coven and inspire centuries of local mythology?”

“No. I’ve never had an odd thought in my life,” said Isabela, and laughed breathlessly when Hawke bit her neck. “Well. I guess that’s that sorted, then,” she said, and then she kissed the laugh out of Hawke’s mouth.

They stayed like that for a while, with the creeping afternoon shadows and the shuffling of the early drunks downstairs, leaning against each other like two pieces of the same broken thing. Then Isabela got up and threw the curtains open to the light.


End file.
